Manfred Zach

Manfred Zach (born June 26, 1947 in Bad Grund (Harz) ) is a German lawyer and writer .

Life

Manfred Zach studied law from 1966 to 1971 at the University of Heidelberg . After the first state examination , he worked temporarily as a freelance journalist. In 1974 he passed his second state examination and began a civil service career as a government assessor for the regional president in Stuttgart .

In 1975 he moved to the State Ministry of Baden-Württemberg as a press officer . From 1978 to 1991 he headed the policy department in the State Ministry; During this time he also worked as a ghostwriter for the Prime Minister Lothar Späth . After his resignation, Zach became head of the administrative department of the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs in the rank of ministerial director . He then heads the “Labor and Social Security” department in the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. He retired at the end of 2013.

After Manfred Zach had already published a number of non-fiction books, he has been making narrative works in public since 1996. In his key novel "Monrepos or the cold of power" he processed his experiences in the Stuttgart government headquarters under Prime Minister Filbinger and Späth. Monrepos Castle stands for the Stuttgart Villa Reitzenstein , the seat of the state government. In his novel The Application from 1999, he describes the dramatically charged mayoral election of a fictional small town in southwest Germany , in which a foreign, north German applicant meets a long-established incumbent as the top dog . The designed story becomes complex because, like Heinrich Böll's novels, it is about a psychological development novel, more precisely: the posthumous reappraisal of a father-son story, but at the same time a portrayal of the lines of relationship and conflict in a provincial German small town . All of this takes place against the background of details of unresolved moral failure that became known historically belatedly in the Nazi regime years of German history. The dramaturgical layout of the novel structure indicates that Zach had both a film adaptation or a stage version in mind, as well as a foreseeable use as school reading for the upper school level. In essence, it describes a basic process of lived democracy, the decisive election of a city leader for five years and the often little-known significance of city ​​archives in a narrative attractive way.

Until 2001, Zach was on the board of the Baden-Württemberg State Association of the Association of German Writers . On January 21, 2006, “Schlossplatz”, his first play, was premiered in the old theater in Stuttgart . In the taz interview with the part-time writer Zach, which appeared on the same day, he confesses that without Lothar Späth's resignation from the Prime Minister's office, his writing career would probably not have existed for him. Instead, he would have had a political career with Späth's chancellorship. Nothing came of that after the change, but Manfred Zach is happy about this reorientation in retrospect.

Works

• Mao Tse-tung. Anecdodic. Bechtle, Esslingen 1969.
• Josef Doerr , Speyer am Rhein 1989 (together with Bernhard Meuser )
• The manipulated public. Politics and media in the thick of relationships. Mut-Verlag, Asendorf 1995, ISBN 3-89182-065-8 .
• Monrepos or The Cold of Power , Tübingen: Klöpfer & Meyer 1996
• The application. Roman Klöpfer & Meyer, Tübingen 1999, ISBN 3-931402-32-0 .
• Bolero or The Revenge of St. Michael , Tübingen: Klöpfer & Meyer 2002
• Crooks, brushes, chicaneurs. A little history of the bureaucracy. Tübingen: Klöpfer & Meyer, 2005, ISBN 3-937667-69-5 .

Web links

• http://kloepfer-meyer.de/site/autoren/Zach_Manfred.html
• Extensive Zach interview about politics and morals, his play and his path in life (taz from January 21, 2006)
• Literature by and about Manfred Zach in the catalog of the German National Library